Lately I have been enjoying looking teardowns and tearing down random electronics myself, because it teaches so much about electronic design - what chips to use, how to lay them out, how to solve common problems etc. So while trashing around in dorms storage rooms I found a barcode reader. It seemed like a good thing to disassemble. It connected with some weird DIN5 connector so it wasn't usable anyway. It had both connectors - female and male, probably to daisy chain it with something.

So I ripped it apart. First thing i found was an awsome linear CMOS image sensor tcd1201d. I even found it's datasheet. It is 2049px sensor with 1MHz speed. I use one just like that in my other project so it went to that project's box. After sensor there was 8x PLCC2 LED, piezo, some 74 series logic and Freescale MC68HC11 microcontroller, seems cool but not worth desoldering. After putting it back together, I striped the wire and sent +5V to red wire and GND to black one. It lighted up and beeped like a weird weapon (or a barcode reader).